With Liberty and Justice for Some

I became interested in reading this book after having finished Ed Snowden's autobiography in which he praised Glenn Greenwald not only for his journalistic fervour but also his compelling prose. I was not surprised then that reading this book was an incredibly enjoyable experience.

Greenwald very concisely depicts an image of a deteriorating rule of law in the United States, resulting in a two-tiered justice system in which a financially and politically powerful elite goes unscrutinised while ordinary citizens in the US and across the world have to suffer from their greed-driven, reckless decisions. Instead of rambling about these issues and giving them the deeply entrenched partisan twist many other journalists are so keen to use, Greenwald stays objective and bases his argumentation entirely on research from a multitude of sources and convincing examples for the deteriorating processes he describes.

As a teenager growing up in Germany, I have certainly heard about many of the issues addressed (Iraq war, Guantánamo, NSA spying, the prison-industrial complex) but at that time never managed or was urged to get a deeper insight into them. Greenwald's work became the perfect starter literature for me to scrutinise the political happenings that have shaped the US as the major western power and thus arguably also my own life. In fact, at multiple points, the book made me look for further literature about the individual legal scandals Greenwald addresses and fortunately also into the founding literature of the American legal system which he identifies as being further and further undermined.

I have to agree with some reviewers that Greenwald's book might be redundant or “preaching to the choir” for people who follow his journalistic work. However, for myself, I could not have found a better entry into US politics than ‘With Liberty and Justice for Some'.

Glenn Greenwald is SO good at writing narrative nonfiction, like, wow. There are a lot of threads here and it's so impressive how well he's able to knit them together into a cohesive portrait of Why Shit In America is Fucked Up. A lot of the material in this book is about things I've already read about (some of it, at least, from shorter articles by Greenwald)–Watergate, Guantanamo, The New Jim Crow, etc–but seeing all those problems and more tied together cohesively is stunning and terrifying.

Highly recommended.